“Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are”:
The Parallel Views of
Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald
on the Road to Equality

Abraham Aamidor

The story of Booker T. Washington is well known. Born near Roanoke, Virginia, in 1856 to an enslaved mother and an unidentified white man who had his way with her, Washington worked in mines and did other manual labor in his youth. Somehow, he learned to read and write well enough, and eventually he made his way to the Hampton Institute, which had been founded in 1868 by a Union Army general near Hampton, Virginia. The school emphasized manual arts education for ex-slaves; this was a program Washington was to largely emulate when he became headmaster of the Tuskegee Institute, near Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881. The school served both young black men and women.

Washington rose to national prominence, first, with his “Atlanta Compromise Speech” in 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition, in which he argued that economic progress for blacks must precede full political equality and almost seemed to endorse separate development of the races, a view that was considered non-threatening to whites.¹ Washington apparently was the first black leader to speak at such a public gathering of important Southern white leaders. Later, he won fame with publication of his autobiography, Up From Slavery, in which he essentially followed a Horatio Alger storyline. This, too, was non-threatening to whites, and it was a reasonably accurate portrait of his struggles in life to that point.

Julius Rosenwald is far less well-known today, though his legacy is a household name because of his connection with the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862 to German-Jewish immigrants. A high school dropout, he sold souvenir booklets door-to-door and played the organ in a Methodist church in Springfield, and at age 16 or 17 went to work in his uncles’ retail clothing store in New York.² In 1885 Rosenwald started a clothing manufacturing business with a cousin, and in 1895 the two bought a substantial interest in a struggling watch and catalog mail-order house, that is, Sears, Roebuck & Co. His big innovations were to expand the catalog greatly, and to guarantee everything in it. Rosenwald was president of Sears from 1908 to 1924, and chairman of the board from 1924 until his death in 1932.

Rosenwald also became famous during his life as a philanthropist. He largely funded the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park on Chicago’s Southside, which was only about two miles from his home, and he helped fund two dozen YMCA’s that catered to African-Americans. Through a challenge-grant program he initiated in 1917, Rosenwald helped build 5,357 schools and teacher’s homes for African-American students in the rural South. At one time in the 1920s, two out of every five African-American children in the Old South who attended school did so in a Rosenwald school.³ Though the school building program ended with Rosenwald’s death in 1932, the Rosenwald Fund supported scholarships and subsidies for many African-American scholars, authors, and artists, such as W.E.B. DuBois, novelist James Baldwin, poet Langston Hughes, singer Marian Anderson, and scores of others.⁴

Rosenwald and Washington first met in Chicago in late 1911; Washington was the keynote speaker at a gathering of civic leaders at Chicago’s lakefront Blackstone Hotel, and Rosenwald was the man who introduced him to the crowd. Rosenwald was taken with his guest, and the man’s cause, and he soon signed on as a trustee of the Tuskegee Institute, a position he held even beyond Washington’s death in 1915. Unlike contemporary white philanthropists who supported African-American causes, Rosenwald actually established a close, personal and working relationship with his main beneficiary, Washington. It was an important relationship–one of the very central figures in black American history, and a leading Jewish philanthropist in America of the time, had a strong working relationship.

Yet the relationship between Rosenwald and Washington is hardly acknowledged today. One collection of scholarly essays published in 1998, African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century, makes one reference to Julius Rosenwald (the context is a low-interest loan he made in 1924 to a black businessman who was being squeezed by white Christian bankers in Atlanta) in one of its essays, and one additional reference to the Rosenwald Fund scholarships in another essay.⁵

The real evidence for a kind of special bond between Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald is that they were, in important ways, two peas in a pod. Both respected hard work and honest labor; neither was really an intellectual or academic. Both had come up the had way, as it were, though Washington had it much harder, being a former slave. Both were fastidious bookkeepers and administrators–Rosenwald was a hands-on manager at Sears who often went over all the books himself and would call his staff in the morning to make sure they were at work, while Washington was a micro-manager who sweated the details and smallest budget expenditures at Tuskegee, even though he often traveled and spoke off-campus.

Each man was similar in other regards, namely in the political and normative realm. Both rejected the militancies that affected their specific ethnic identities (a nascent Back to Africa movement and aggressive political campaigning in the case of Washington, and Zionism in the case of Rosenwald). Rather, each believed one could achieve equality through hard work and self-improvement, and by making oneself valuable and desirable to the people whose hearts and minds one wanted to conquer. It is this cautious political temperament, this faith in progress per se, both in one’s own people and in fellow man, that I think drew the two men together and created a real empathy and mutual respect for each other.

Yet both men faced harsh criticism from their own people, as it were, for their moderate political and social views. The critique of Washington is well-known–he was “the great accommodator” who allegedly thought blacks were only good for the trades, or who allegedly didn’t protest lynchings (a patently false charge, by the way). For example, Washington wrote in his autobiography, “When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, to write a book, or a Negro boy learns to groom a horse, or to grow sweet potatoes, or to produce butter, or to build a house, or to be able to practice medicine, as well or better than anyone else, they will be rewarded regardless of race or color. In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants.”⁶

Rosenwald also felt that his people would achieve equality and justice when they became respected by the Gentiles. For example, after World War I, Rosenwald gave $100,000 for relief work in Germany, without regard to whether recipients were Lutheran, Catholic, Jewish, or anything else. When challenged by a correspondent as to why he did not at least link the gift to a formal protest of emerging anti-Semitism in that country, he wrote: “The fact that the Jews are ‘giving more than their share toward helping all the different creeds in Germany’ is known and, to my mind, it is more helpful to give without protest which would make it appear that the money was given for the purpose of having the Jew-baiting stopped. My opinion is that this disagreeable thing will subside of its own accord as rapidly as it would if any form of propaganda were resorted to.”⁷ (Italics in the original.)

Rosenwald also once wrote to a University of Chicago undergraduate, who had complained that he was barred from a fraternity as soon as it was learned that he was Jewish, that the young man could best protest such “ignorance” by becoming a success later in life and thereby proving he was worthy of acceptance, and that he should make sure he never discriminates against others as others had discriminated against him.⁸

Just why Rosenwald selected black education as his primary charity is not clear (he also supported poor Jews in America, Russia, Turkey, and Palestine, but did not support emigration to Palestine.)⁹ Some authors say his Jewish background made him sensitive to racial persecution; others have said his fondness for the American ideal made him despise the double standard toward blacks.

Another hypothesis is that Rosenwald was propelled to help blacks after reading An American Citizen, the Life of William H. Baldwin, Jr., by John Graham Brooks, in 1910; Baldwin had specifically advocated on behalf of educational opportunities for Southern blacks.¹⁰ It was Paul Sachs, a New York investment banker, who had first brought Baldwin’s story to the attention of Rosenwald.¹¹ Certainly the timing is interesting; Rosenwald became involved with Tuskegee in 1912.

It is also true that many very wealthy Northern whites supported education for blacks as the true key to their emancipation, and had not this been the ideal that Jews had used in Europe once they escaped the ghettoes and were allowed into the universities and the professions? Decades before school desegregation in Topeka and Little Rock, and before affirmative action policies at most colleges and universities, wealthy whites were encouraging blacks to hit the books, not take up arms. A veritable who’s who of Northern philanthropists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries supported both elementary and higher education for blacks, as well as teacher training for blacks. George Peabody had established the Peabody Educational Fund in 1867; John D. Rockefeller established the General Education Board around 1901; Anna T. Jeanes established what is commonly remembered as the Jeanes Fund in 1907; Henry H. Rogers, president of the Standard Oil Co., made direct contributions to the Tuskegee Institute beginning in 1904; and Jacob Schiff, the New York financier, supported much of Rosenwald’s efforts.¹²

Rosenwald’s brand of philanthropy is as little remembered as the man himself, but it was distinctive–he believed in setting “time limits” for the expenditure of major gifts, typically a generation, because he believed each new generation could best decide its own needs. It would be counterproductive to impose constraints from the grave, as it were, on future needs. In particular, he warned against “permanent endowments” because he was suspicious that charities and such have a way of being more interested in perpetuating themselves rather than truly fulfilling their mission statements.¹³ So, in one sense, Rosenwald wrote himself out of history.

Rosenwald and Washington first met on 18 May 1911, in Chicago. Rosenwald introduced the already well-known black leader and orator to a host of important Chicago businessmen at the landmark Blackstone Hotel on South Michigan Avenue and heaped “fulsome praise” on his guest. “Whether it’s because I belong to a people who have known centuries of persecution, or whether it is because I am naturally inclined to sympathize with the oppressed, I have always felt keenly for the colored race…,” Rosenwald told an audience of about 200. “The wise, statesmanlike leader who is our guest today,” he continued, “is greatly serving two races, which, but for his ministry of conciliation, might drift into irreconcilable antagonism. He is helping his own race to attain the high art of self-help and self-dependence, and he is helping the white race to learn that opportunity and obligation go hand in hand. … Happy is the nation which, in the words of the late Judge Brewer, knows and honors a Washington, whether he be George or Booker.”¹⁴

According to biographer M.R. Werner, Rosenwald’s chauffer at first protested driving Washington anywhere during this visit, and challenged his boss as to whether he, Rosenwald, would ride in the same car as a black man. When Rosenwald assured him that he would, the chauffer dropped his objection.¹⁵ It is not recorded if Washington was permitted to stay overnight at the Blackstone or if he stayed instead with Rosenwald at the latter’s home on South Ellis Avenue, but Washington did stay with Rosenwald on later visits.

Predictably, perhaps, Washington was effusive in praise of his host, as well. “The bad colored people and the bad white people always get together,” Washington said from behind the lectern during his speech at the Blackstone. “The time has come,” he continued, “when the best colored people and the best white people should get together and know each other and, Mr. Rosenwald, if you had not done anything else through this movement than to give the white people of Chicago a chance to know the kind of colored people they have in Chicago, your investment would be a paying one.”¹⁶

The occasion was promotion of YMCA’s for blacks in large northern cities, such as Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and elsewhere, which Rosenwald was helping fund, both through his own direct donations and recruiting efforts directed at other wealthy philanthropists. Rosenwald had become involved in the effort to build a YMCA for blacks in his Hyde Park neighborhood beginning in 1908; he contributed $25,000 to the campaign two years later. “I have been considering for some time the question of the best method of assisting the colored people, particularly in our large cities, in securing such facilities for education and recreation as are offered to others through your organization in Chicago and similar organizations in other cities,” he wrote to the YMCA of Chicago in 1910. “It has seemed to me,” he continued, “that both in the interest of the colored race and in the interest of the country, it is essential that there should be in every community in which there are large numbers of colored people a building primarily for men and boys, devoted to such purposes for their use. They have not as yet, in their own ranks, a sufficient number of people whose means would enable them to establish and adequately equip such institutions, and it is therefore, in my judgment, the duty of the white people of this country, irrespective of their religious beliefs, to evidence their interest in the welfare of these, their neighbors, by assisting to supply this need.”¹⁷

Washington soon invited Rosenwald to visit Tuskegee and made the first of his many solicitations to the retail magnate for money for the school, but also for a YMCA building Washington wanted to build at or near Tuskegee.¹⁸

Rosenwald’s first visit to Alabama came in October 1911. The Tuskegee student newspaper was to write, “Mr. Julius Rosenwald, head of the firm of Sears, Roebuck and Company, Chicago, reached Tuskegee Institute Thursday morning of this week in a private car, for a two day visit, accompanied by his wife; his brother, Mr. Maurice Rosenwald and wife; his sister, Mrs. Eisendrath; Rabbi Emile (sic) G. Hirsch, lecturer and publicist; Dr. E.G. Cooley, former superintendent of schools, Chicago; Mr. L.W. Messer, General Secretary of the YMCA, Chicago; and Professor Graham Taylor of the University of Chicago.” About 2,000 students and faculty received the visitors at the Tuskegee chapel, where they sang old-time spirituals in honor of their guests.¹⁹

Rosenwald became a Trustee of the school the next year, and he and his wife made several personal visits to the institute over the next several years.²⁰ Mrs. Rosenwald personally helped redecorate the Tuskegee guest house, and she led workshops in baking, cooking and dressmaking. “When their special car backed up to the small railroad station in Alabama each spring, there was always a throng of students, cheering joyously,” writes Werner. “Sometimes,” he continued, “when they arrived at night, they were greeted with a flaming torchlight procession, led by a brass band. …”²¹

Besides donating money to Tuskegee directly, Rosenwald also personally donated money for the construction of six elementary schools near Tuskegee–these were to become the first of the so-called “Rosenwald schools,” though the vast majority were built after 1917, when the Rosenwald Fund was incorporated in Chicago.

Rosenwald’s personal commitment to the black cause was demonstrated in other ways: In 1915 he successfully interceded with Mayor Bill Thompson of Chicago to have the racist film “Birth of a Nation” banned in that city.²²

Call it liberalism or call it noblesse oblige, but Rosenwald believed in helping blacks. His influential rabbi, Emil G. Hirsch, had long supported civil rights for blacks, and the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood where Rosenwald lived (and which also was home to the University of Chicago, another benefactor of Rosenwald’s largesse) was the leading integrated neighborhood in Chicago for many decades in the twentieth century.

The Rosenwald schools are not much more remembered today than Julius Rosenwald himself. In 2002 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the schools (collectively) as one of America’s eleven most endangered historic places. Though historically important, the schools were never architecturally interesting–almost invariably, they were one or two-story stick-built or rectangular brick building with large windows for light (electricity generally was not available in the rural areas where most of the schools were built). Part of the National Trust’s initiative simply is to take an inventory of the schools that might still be standing.²³

If Julius Rosenwald was sensitive to the black condition in America, Booker T. Washington could also claim he was sensitive to the Jewish Question, as the issue of minority rights for Jews was known for a long time. He wrote sympathetically and admiringly about the Jews in “The Future of the American Negro,” a book first published in 1899 and reproduced in The Booker T. Washington Papers:

We have a very bright and striking example in the history of the Jews in this and other countries. There is, perhaps, no race that has suffered so much, not so much in America as in some of the countries in Europe. But these people have clung together. They have had a certain amount of unity, pride, and love of race; and, as the years go on, they will be more and more influential in this country,–a country where they once were despised, and looked upon with scorn and derision. It is largely because the Jewish race has had faith in itself. Unless the Negro learns more and more to imitate the Jew in these matters, to have faith in himself, he cannot expect to have any high degree of success.²⁴

In a speech in Little Rock in 1905 Washington had told the audience, “We sometimes grow discouraged and despondent because of our condition in this country. In Russia there are one-half as many Jews as there are Negroes in this country, and yet I feel sure that within a month more Jews have been persecuted and killed than the whole number of our people who have been lynched during the past forty years, but this, of course, is no excuse for lynching.”²⁵

Still fresh in Washington’s mind, as with most educated people in the West, were the Kishniev riots of 1903. Dozens of Jews were killed and hundreds injured in this Southwestern Russian town after a 14-year-old Christian boy had been found murdered; rumors had it that the Jews had killed the boy for Passover blood to bake their traditional unleavened bread.

In 1911, after a lengthy visit to Europe, Washington wrote about the condition of the Jews in various countries–from apparent full equality in Denmark to squalor in Poland, where Washington was struck by the impoverished, black-coated Orthodox Jews with their long side curls.²⁶

Washington’s admiration for the Jews is both clear and constant in his writing, though it is never obsequious. Cynics might argue that his sympathy for the Jews was cunning–after all, he needed their money. Adib Rashad simply calls the relationship with Rosenwald “the high point of (Washington’s) efforts to enlist the financial support of wealthy Jews to invest in his academic and business proposals for Blacks.”²⁷ But the fact is Washington understood that the great question of minority rights in Europe involved the Jews, just as the great question of minority rights in America primarily involved blacks. Washington was aware of the Jewish Question for decades, and he was unafraid to write and speak about it, something that might have cost him support among anti-Semites.

Other writers on Washington have noted one statement he made that has possibly been construed either as anti-Semitism on his part, or as proof that the Jews really were exploitative. In an oft-quoted excerpt from a letter he penned to his associate Lloyd G. Wheeler at Tuskegee in 1904, Washington wrote, “In looking over our bills from Montgomery, I very much fear that we are getting our trade too much centered in the hands of a few Jews. Whenever we can get equally fair treatment in prices from persons other than Jews, I prefer to have our trade scattered among them. In creating public sentiment in favor of the institution the Jews cannot be of much service. I mean not nearly so much as is true of native Southern white men. …”²⁸

It is the first part of the statement that is frequently quoted (“too much of our trade centered in the Jews”), not the second part about the challenge or receiving “equally fair treatment” from non-Jews. The implication is clear and irrefutable–he got fair treatment from Jews. Plus, he shows a clear-eyed recognition of anti-Semitism on the part of others (“In creating public sentiment in favor of the institution the Jews cannot be of much service.”)

Why send his trade elsewhere? The rationale for the apparent discrimination is entirely pragmatic, not anti-Semitic and, in the next paragraph of the same letter to Wheeler, he specifically praises Jacques Loeb, owner of Winter Loeb Grocery Co., and vice-president of the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce and secretary of the United Hebrew Charities of Montgomery.

If both Washington and Rosenwald had remarkable empathy for the sufferings of each other’s peoples, they also saw the way out of their respective holes via progress and evolution, not nationalism based on ethnic identity. This meant Washington’s rejection of the emerging “back to Africa” philosophy (later identified with Marcus Garvey) and what today would be called militancy, and Rosenwald’s rejection of Zionism.

Washington’s position on Black Nationalism is clear–he dismissed it out of hand. For example, after Washington’s European visit in 1899, he summarized a talk with a British Member of Parliament: “I talked with him about Africa and its relation to the American Negro, and after my interview with him I became more convinced than ever that there was no hope in the American Negro’s improving his condition by emigrating to Africa.”²⁹

As late as 1910, he again dismissed any notion of a return to Africa. He told a London correspondent that, “I think it is with the African pretty much as it with the Jews, there is a good deal of talk about it, but nothing is done, there is certainly no sign of any exodus to Liberia.”³⁰

Zionism was no more acceptable to Rosenwald, though his views on the subject were somewhat complex; he simply described himself as a “non-Zionist” rather than an anti-Zionist.³¹ At its simplest, Zionism is the belief that anti-Semitism is a response to the anomalous condition of the Jews for the past 2,800 years (since the fall of the ancient northern Kingdom of Israel, preceding the failure of the Jewish Revolt and subsequent exile from Palestine circa 70 C.E.), and the fact that the Jews were a people without a land of their own. Many people in history have suffered the taunt, “Go back where you came from,” but where would the Jews go back to, asked the Zionists? The first Zionist Congress was held in Basle, Switzerland in 1897, and the Zionist movement was given great impetus both by the continuing Russian pogroms (massacres) of Jews and the drawn-out Dreyfus Affair in France (1896-1906), in which a French Army officer of Jewish descent was falsely accused of passing military secrets to Germany.

Zionism also was a repudiation of faith in the Enlightenment and human rights movement in Europe–repeated promises to offer equality to the Jews and to protect the Jews had broken down, and the Zionists decided they could trust no one but themselves. Left-wing critics of Zionism routinely dismiss it as an adjunct of imperialism and colonialism, especially as it was Great Britain that endorsed the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine as part of deals with France to carve up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. More sympathetic analyses note that the Zionists sought to emulate smaller nationalist movements in Europe, South America, and even Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and argued that they, too, deserved a national homeland.

In a striking series of newspaper articles in a small Jewish newspaper dating from 1928, a journalist repeatedly challenged Rosenwald on his true feelings toward a possible Jewish state (it was prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948):

Mr. Rosenwald’s theory of the Jewish question is that, in so far as it is an economic problem–it must be solved in the country of their residence. … “As to Palestine,” concluded Mr. Rosenwald, “I must state that in my estimation it is just a desert–say like the desert of Arizona in the United States. Of what earthly use would the Arizona desert be to the Jews if the American government offered it to them for colonization? In Palestine the Jews can accomplish nothing. While I consider it my duty to help those Jews who are already there–just as I would help Jews wherever they should happen to be in need–I shall not lift a finger to advance the emigration of Jews to Palestine. …”³²

Later, he called Zionism an “expedient.” The occasion was a protest against Moslem riots against Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 1929; Rosenwald had joined several Zionists and non-Zionists alike at a forum in Madison Square Garden in New York City to denounce the riots, which included the indiscriminate slaughter of about seventy Jews in Hebron, almost all of whom were Sephardic Jews who had families dating back centuries in that city. Some people construed Rosenwald’s appearance at the protest as an endorsement of the Zionism per se rather than, as Rosenwald was to argue, the sanctity of all life, including Jewish life.

“My attending so important an event as the Zionist Protest meeting ought not to cause you the slightest surprise,” he wrote to Judge Julian W. Mack. “You know I have always been interested in everything,” he continued, “that pertains to the movement and to Palestine, even though I could not agree with the theories on which Zionism is based. … Furthermore, I have always felt that the experiment is fraught with the greatest danger, and I think I have frequently expressed to you my belief that the more successful the experiment is from the Jewish standpoint, the more dangerous it is.”³³

In his thinking, Rosenwald was in line with his rabbi, Emil G. Hirsch, the same man who accompanied him to Alabama during his first visit to Tuskegee. In general, rabbis such as Hirsch, who was a leader of the “reform” movement (meaning, among other things, that they sought to construe “Jewishness” solely as referring to religion, not ethnicity; and to simplify Jewish prayer and do away with most dietary laws), were anti-Zionist. For example, Hirsch once wrote, “We modern Jews do not wish to be restored to Palestine–the country wherein we live is our Palestine.”³⁴

Rosenwald and Hirsch were not alone is their coolness to Zionism, either, particularly among more successful and well-placed Jews in America and England, and especially among Jews whose families had earlier emigrated from Germany, which was considered the most liberal and tolerant country in Europe at the time vis-à-vis the Jews. Opposition to Zionism within Jewish circles was informed by the Enlightenment and largely followed an assimilationist line–Jews were just like other people and were citizens of the countries in which they lived.³⁵

Washington rejected Africa; Rosenwald rejected Palestine. Put another way, both men believed in progress for people where they were at the time, and not in some idealized past or future. Or, as Washington famously said in his Atlanta Compromise Address, “cast down your bucket where you are.”

Booker T. Washington is still remembered by some as “the great accommodator.” Washington’s contemporary, the more strident W.E.B. DuBois, is far more respected in black intellectual and white progressive circles today. But at least Washington is remembered–history has been far less kind to Julius Rosenwald.

Washington died on 14 November, 1915. Against the advice of doctors, he returned home after a long illness struck him in New York specifically to die at home; he succumbed the morning after he returned by train to Tuskegee. Respectful obituaries appeared everywhere–he was the Moses of his race. Julius Rosenwald, who was the one trustee repeatedly consulted during the illness for advice by Washington’s assistants, also acknowledged his friend’s death with a personal gift of $100,000 for more elementary schools–it was this gift more than any that set in motion a kind of matching fund program in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee that led to the plethora of “Rosenwald schools” in succeeding years.³⁶

Julius Rosenwald died 6 January, 1932. They sang an old hymn, “Walking in Jerusalem Just Like John,” at Tuskegee in his honor (the same hymn always was played for Rosenwald during his 1911-1915 visits to the campus). Of many obituaries in the public press accompanying the announcement of Rosenwald’s death, the most interesting came from DuBois. DuBois had been the leading black critic of Booker T. Washington and his accommodationist approach for a generation. It may seem surprising that DuBois, of all people, would eulogize the great enabler of the great accommodator, but that is what he did.

“The death of Julius Rosenwald brings to an end a career remarkable, especially for its significance to American Negroes,” DuBois wrote. “As a Jew,” he continued, “Julius Rosenwald did not have to be initiated into the methods of race prejudice and his philanthropic work was a crushing arraignment o the American white Christians. Knowing that the YMCA discriminated grossly against Negroes, Rosenwald calmly offered to help pay for Negro Association buildings. … Seeing again that the white south did not propose to build decent school houses for most colored children, Rosenwald again offered to help pay for such school houses provided they were real school houses and on modern lines. The south accepted his gift diffusively and never even to this day, 1932, has apparently grasped the failure of democracy which permitted an individual of a despised race to do for the solvern states of a great nation that which they had neither the decency nor justice to do for themselves. Beyond this, Rosenwald reached out toward public libraries and hospitals and endowed a great fund to carry on his work after his death. He was a great man. But he was no mere philanthropist. He was rather the subtle, stinging critic of our racial democracy.”³⁷

Notes

1 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 217-37, for a text of the speech and commentary.

2 Edwin R. Embree and Julia Waxman, Investment in People: The Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949), 12.

3 Embree and Waxman, 51-5. Embree and Waxman report that the schools were erected at a cost of more than $28 million, and that costs were underwritten by local black contributions and tax receipts, as well as by distributions from the Fund and additional, direct contributions from Rosenwald’s personal accounts.

4 See Embree and Waxman, Appendix C for complete list.

5 V. P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, Genna Rae McNeil, editors, African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 38-9.

6 Washington, Up From Slavery, 281.

7 M.R. Werner, Julius Rosenwald: The Life of a Practical Humanitarian (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1939), 254-5.

8 Letter on file in the Julius Rosenwald Papers at the Special Collection Research Center-University of Chicago Library, box and folder not recorded.

9 Werner, 256.

10 Alicia S. Roberts, “Rosenwald, Julius,” Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, found at http://www.learningtogive.org/papers/index.asp?bpid=121.

11 Werner, 107-108. (Baldwin, a railroad executive from Boston, was an early trustee of Tuskegee and, according to Werner, was instrumental in convincing steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to make substantial donations to Tuskegee.)

12 Benjamin Brawley, A Social History of the American Negro, Part 7, transcript found at http://www.fullbooks.com/A-Social-History-of-the-American-Negro7.html. See also Jerry Wayne Woods, “The Julius Rosenwald Fund School Building Program: A Saga in the Growth and Development of African-American Education in Selected West Tennessee Communities,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1995, 57. Also, see David G. Dalin, “What Julius Rosenwald Knew,” Commentary, April 1998. Also, see Werner, 112-14.

13 Martin Morse Wooster, “Debates on Perpetuity: Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and the Widely Praised Article that Donors Ignored,” Philanthropy Magazine, July /August 1998, found at http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/1998/july/wooster.html. See also Embree and Waxman, and Roberts (above).

14 Louis R. Harlan, editor, The Booker T. Washington Paper (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1981-83), Volume 11: 1911-12, 166. (Virtually the entire collection is available online as a searchable database through historycooperative.org; future citations will be referred to as BTW Papers, then volume and page number.)

15 Werner, 121-22.

16 BTW Papers, 11:1911-12, 163.

17 Woods, 35-6.

18 BTW Papers, 11: 1911-12, 166.

19 Woods, 57-8.

20 Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 197.

21 Werner, 126.

22 Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915, 433.

23 See also http://www.rosenwaldschools.com and http://www.rosenwaldplans.org.

24 BTW Papers, 5: 1899-1900, 369-70.

25 BTW Papers, 8: 1904-06, 440.

26 BTW Papers, 11: 1911-12, 390-7.

27 Adib Rashad, “The Pragmatic Booker T. Washington,” found at http://www.themarcusgarveybbs.com/board/msgs/10127.html.

28 BTW Papers, 8:1904-06, 97.

29 Washington, Up From Slavery, 285. (Washington hardly wrote about Africa outside of an 1899-1900 time frame; it was not on the agenda at all for him.)

30 BTW Papers, 10: 1909-11, 382.

31 Dr. S. Melamed, “Julius Rosenwald About the Crimea and Palestine,” interview in The Day, 3 August 1928, transcript located in the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Julius Rosenwald Papers, Box 54, Folder 11.

32 Dr. S. Melamed, “The Future of American Judaism: An Interview with the Famous Millionaire-Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald,” originally published in The Day, 15 July 1928, typed translation on file in the Julius Rosenwald Papers at the Special Collection Research Center-University of Chicago Library, Box 54 Folder 11.

33 Werner, 262.

34 “Chicago: Incubator of American Zionism,” found at Jewish Virtual Library, a division of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/chicago.html. See also Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990), 29-30.

35 See also Kolsky.

36 Werner, 131.

37 Peter Ascoli, “The Rosenwald School Building Program in the Rural South: 1913-1931,” a lecture delivered 13 February 2003, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, Ark., found at http://www.clt.astate.edu/heritagestudies/asu_lecture.htm, 10. See also Peter Ascoli, “Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South” (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006, in press).